Book Review Teaser :: Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

New on Fantastic Reviews is Aaron's review of Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear.

From Aaron's book review of Range of Ghosts :
Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear won the very first bracket, the Winter 2012 bracket, of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books, and a wonderfully deserving winner it was.

Elizabeth Bear is still a fairly new author - her first novel Hammered appeared in 2005 - but it feels like she is a veteran of the field. She has already published over twenty books, ranging between science fiction and fantasy in both series and stand-alone books, and she has won the Campbell Award for best new author and two Hugo Awards for her short fiction.

Range of Ghosts is the first in Bear's epic The Eternal Sky fantasy trilogy, drawing heavily on the history of the Mongol Empire. As the story begins, the Great Khagan has died, and his descendants have fought a bloody battle over succession, the kind of civil war that actually fractured the Mongol Empire. Temur, grandson of the Great Khagan, fought on the losing side for his brother. Temur survived the battle only because he was so grievously wounded he was left for dead....

...Our second major viewpoint character is Samarkar, from the neighboring Rasan Empire. Samarkar has willingly left her powerful family and undergone surgery leaving her barren, so that she may train to be a sorceress. Sent to investigate reports of dark sorcery, Samarkar encounters Temur...

To read the entire review -> Range of Ghosts

Battle of the Books, Winter 2012, Championship Round :: Eyes Like Leaves by Charles de Lint vs. Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

The championship match of the inaugural bracket of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books pits Eyes Like Leaves by Charles de Lint against Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear. I've read to page 200 of both books (a little more than halfway through both), and the championship of the Winter Bracket goes to the book I most want to continue reading to the end. The winner will be featured in a full review at Fantastic Reviews (we'll also try to arrange an interview with the author), and will be eligible for the overall 2012 Battle of the Books Championship at the end of the year.

Eyes Like Leaves: Tachyon trade paperback, February 2012, 313 pages, cover art by Lauren Kelly Small. Eyes Like Leaves advanced to the finals by defeating When We Were Executioners by J.M. McDermott in the first round, then The Scar by Sergey & Marina Dyachenko in the second round, and finally Shadows in Flight by Orson Scott Card in the semifinals.

Eyes Like Leaves is a secondary world fantasy in a land similar to ancient Ireland. The wizard Tarn and his mentor Puretongue, who have the ability to change shape, are attempting to defend their land against the forces of the Icelord, who wishes to bring an endless winter. So far, Tarn has met up with Carrie, a young woman unaware of her own magical abilities, and the two of them have been hotly pursued by various "stormkin." Meanwhile, Puretongue and another young protégé travel by sea to meet them.

Range of Ghosts: Tor hardcover, March 2012, 334 pages. Range of Ghosts got to the finals with wins over Jack of Ravens by Mark Chadbourn in the first round, then The Pillars of Hercules by David Constantine in the second round, and finally And Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht in the semifinals.

Range of Ghosts is the first volume of an epic trilogy in a setting inspired by the ancient Mongol Empire. Our hero Temur is in exile, after his brother was on the losing side of a war of succession against their uncle, but the uncle still wants Temur dead. Ghosts summoned by a sorcerer working for the uncle have abducted Temur's lover, and he has traveled to the "Range of Ghosts" to retrieve her. He is destined to meet up with Samarkar, a woman who has willingly undergone surgery leaving her barren, so she can train to be a wizard.

The Battle: I judge the Winter 2012 Battle of the Books a great success, because it resulted in me finding two excellent novels, both of which I highly recommend. Charles de Lint has long been one of the finest fantasists around, and Elizabeth Bear has joined him at the pinnacle of the genre.

Both Eyes Like Leaves and Range of Ghosts are exquisitely written throughout. Through the first three rounds, I've given numerous examples of the wonderful prose in both books -- click on the links above to read those samples. The sheer strength of the authors' writing has carried these two books to the finals. Because the quality of prose is so strong in both books, this battle will come down to which novel's story works best for me, now that I'm deeper into both books.

Both have engaging storylines, with appealing yet flawed main characters. I am enjoying both of them very much, and plan to finish them both. But, forced to choose, I must say that one of them is a bit more compelling to me, and I would be a bit more distraught if you pried it out of my fingers before I could finish. I think the difference comes down to two things.

First, while in Eyes Like Leaves, Charles de Lint makes effective use of Irish landscape and history and mythology, such as druids and shape-shifters, these are all story elements that are quite familiar to fantasy readers. Likewise, the evil lord seeking to bring an endless winter is a well-worn fantasy trope. It is to de Lint's credit that he combines these elements skillfully enough that the story never feels tired or derivative.

However, Range of Ghosts offers the more original fantasy world. I believe the main narrative is loosely based on the life of Timur, aka Tamerlane (1370-1405), but Elizabeth Bear has used his story as a springboard to create a unique landscape filled with unusual and fascinating fantasy elements. To take one of many examples, I love the way the moons in the night sky represent the heirs to the empire's throne, with a moon disappearing any time one of the emperor's descendants is killed -- and then suddenly all the moons disappear in favor of the single moon we know, when Temur crosses over the border to a neighboring land. Nearly every chapter has an interesting and unusual element like that.

Second, in Eyes Like Leaves, I love the main narrative thread involving Tarn and Carrie. There is a very nice sequence in the second hundred pages, for instance, where they have to shapeshift into the form of evil creatures to evade their pursuers, but then Tarn starts to lose himself in the role. But the sequences from the point of view of Puretongue and various side characters -- there are a surprising number of POV shifts in the second hundred pages -- are less compelling to me. In those other sequences, I was always anxious to get back to Tarn and Carrie.

There are no sections in Range of Ghosts that I feel any desire to hurry through. Over the second hundred pages, the novice female wizard Samarkar has emerged as just as important and engaging a character as Temur, with an interesting backstory. The sections from her point of view feature less action than Temur's, but they are equally absorbing. I'm also very interested in the glimpses of al-Sepehr, the dark sorcerer doing Temur's uncle's bidding, but clearly pursuing his own agenda. He is an intriguing, three-dimensional villain (or apparent villain), something that Eyes Like Leaves lacks.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Bear on a remarkable effort. I am confident that this time next year, Range of Ghosts will be on a very short list of my favorite novels of 2012. It is a most worthy winner in our inaugural bracket of the 2012 Battle of the Books.

THE WINNER: RANGE OF GHOSTS by Elizabeth Bear

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by to check out the Battle of the Books, and especially to the many participating authors who have commented here or blogged, tweeted, etc. about the contest.

If you've enjoyed this new format, you'll be happy to know that the review copies continue to pour in. We already have our next 16 books, and we will announce the bracket for the Spring 2012 Battle of the Books next week.

Battle of the Books, Winter 2012, Second Semifinal :: And Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht vs. Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

Our second Battle of the Books semifinal matches And Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht against Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear. Whichever book I most want to continue reading after the first 100 pages will advance to the championship round.

And Blue Skies from Pain: Night Shade trade paperback, March 2012, 359 pages, cover art by Min Yum. And Blue Skies from Pain got here with wins in the first round over Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Boneyards and in the second round over Ari Marmell's Thief's Covenant.

In And Blue Skies from Pain (title from Pink Floyd) and its prequel, Of Blood and Honey, the Catholic Church has been engaged in a centuries-long battle with fallen angels and other supernatural creatures. In Northern Ireland in the 1970's, our characters are working to forge a peace between the Church and the shapeshifting Fianna. In the first 50 pages, our protagonist Liam, the son of a mortal and one of the Fianna, agreed to be tested to help the Catholic warrior-priests determine if he has a soul. But in the next 50 pages, things go awry, as a group of the priest-warriors beat Liam senseless for no apparent reason. Liam's friend, Father Murray, believes the soldiers were under the influence of the Fallen, and he tries to persuade Liam not to abandon the peace process.

Range of Ghosts: Tor hardcover, March 2012, 334 pages. Range of Ghosts reached the semifinals by defeating Jack of Ravens by Mark Chadbourn in the first round and The Pillars of Hercules by David Constantine (aka David J. Williams?) in the second round.

Range of Ghosts is epic fantasy in a setting inspired by the ancient Mongol Empire. The first 50 pages introduced us to our hero Temur, who barely survived the fighting in a war of succession that Temur's late brother lost to their uncle. Temur has gone into exile, befriending some of the other survivors of the fighting, but he is pursued by ghosts summoned by a powerful sorcerer in his uncle's employ. In the next 50 pages, we see much more of another key character, Samarkar, a woman who has willingly undergone surgery leaving her barren, in order to train as a sorcerer, if she proves to have the requisite magical ability. Meanwhile, Temur has survived the fight with the ghosts, but they have abducted his young lover, and he undertakes a quest to rescue her from the mountainous region called the Range of Ghosts. (Thankfully, it doesn't take him many pages to get there -- this is not a travelogue quest fantasy.)

The Battle: Stina Leicht is a new author who finds herself in the Battle of the Books semifinals with three heavyweights of the genre: Elizabeth Bear, Charles de Lint, and Orson Scott Card. But she acquits herself very nicely with And Blue Skies from Pain. I am highly impressed with her confidence in telling this story. This is a book about werewolf-like creatures that she manages to make feel very fresh, a story with a protagonist who is rough around the edges and yet most sympathetic, a story convincingly set in Ireland even though Leicht is an American living in Texas.

On the strength of these 100 pages, I'll be nominating Stina Leicht for the Campbell Award for best new author, and if you have a ballot you should too. (As an aside, there are many interesting new writers in the field today, and I strongly encourage more people to nominate for the Campbell. Start with Stina Leicht, and then name four other new writers who have impressed you. If you can't think of four others, then check out the Writertopia list of Campbell-eligible authors. And if you happen to notice that I'm also on that list, under my pretentious full name Van Aaron Hughes, well, that's cool too.)

The bad news for Leicht is she has run into a juggernaut in Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear. This book combines fantasy storytelling at the level of George R.R. Martin with an Eastern flavor that puts me in mind of Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven. The plotting and characterization is first-rate, and then you add to that the setpieces, which remind you why you first became a fantasy reader, for that sense of the magical. Here, for instance, is a monk with failing eyesight, tending to the numberless dead from the war of succession that triggered our story:

But he was not so blind yet that he could not see the color and motion as another butterfly flitted past--this one brilliant orange--then another, and another, and one more, until they filled the air with a tumult of wings so thick one could hear them whispering and smell their dusty scent. His fingertips crept to his lips and pressed there, as if to hold the exclamation in.

The butterflies swirled around him, shimmering changeable colors like rare jewels: blues and golds and greens and vermilions, pearl-whites, purples verging on blacks, reds like the heartsblood that twined slender vines up the steppe grass to wave above it, throwing its bright heads high into the ceaseless wind. He felt the brush of their wings. He breathed between his fingers so as not to inhale one.

If the monk had been able to see from the perspective of a falcon or one of the black birds to which he commended the dead, he would have known that each butterfly flitted into existence over the lips of a dead man or boy or occasional woman. That each one then beat wings to gain altitude and joined the general migration.

I know this kind of beautiful yet tragic imagery will stay with me long after I put this book down.

THE WINNER: RANGE OF GHOSTS by Elizabeth Bear

Range of Ghosts proceeds to the championship round, to take on Eyes Like Leaves by Charles de Lint.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Winter 2012 :: Final Four

We are down to the Final Four in the Winter 2012 Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books:

Eyes Like Leaves by Charles de Lint vs. Shadows in Flight by Orson Scott Card

And Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht vs. Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

A huge thank you to everyone who has taken an interest in this tournament. Hits at the blog are way up over the past month, and at least half the authors of books in the tournament commented on it at our blog or their own or at Facebook or Twitter. We're very glad folks seem to enjoy this new format. We know we're having a blast, and plan to continue with this format for the foreseeable future. We already have 14 books for the next bracket, so we'll be announcing our Spring Bracket shortly after the current Winter Bracket concludes. Authors and publicists, if you want your book included, you can find the rules and an address to send your book here.

As for the rest of this bracket, we will announce the Charles de Lint / Orson Scott Card winner on Monday, the Elizabeth Bear / Stina Leicht contest on Tuesday, and then crown a champion on Thursday, February 16.

Looking over the bracket, we have discovered a lot more good than bad. While not every book has been to my (Aaron's) tastes, they are all very capably written, including the two self-published books. The books I had to drop out in the second round were so good that we are considering doing full reviews of a couple of them -- or maybe even following up with a consolation bracket.

I am a bit surprised that the four books we named as the "seeded" books at the outset all ended up advancing to the Final Four -- I was expecting more upsets than that. But I suspect that has a lot to do with the composition of this particular bracket. It wasn't that hard to anticipate that Charles de Lint or Elizabeth Bear might come up with a pretty fair book. It looks like our next bracket will have fewer "big names," and thus should be harder to predict.

As with the March Madness tournament, the upside of not having a lot of upsets is that the Final Four features a very high level of competition. Charles de Lint, Orson Scott Card, Elizabeth Bear, and Stina Leicht? Who couldn't find something they enjoyed reading out of that group? Don't forget to check back next week when we announce the results!

Battle of the Books, Winter 2012, Second Round :: Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear vs. The Pillars of Hercules by David Constantine

Our final second round match in the Winter 2012 Battle of the Books pits Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear against The Pillars of Hercules by David Constantine. Whichever book I most want to continue reading after 50 pages will grab the last spot in the semifinals.

Range of Ghosts: Tor hardcover, March 2012, 334 pages. Range of Ghosts got here by defeating Jack of Ravens by Mark Chadbourn in the first round.

Range of Ghosts is epic fantasy in a land very similar to the ancient Mongol Empire. Our hero Temur was gravely wounded fighting for his brother in a war of succession against their uncle. In the first 25 pages, we saw Temur head into exile along with other survivors of the fighting, but as a potential rival for the throne, his uncle still wants Temur dead and has called on a powerful sorcerer to eliminate him. In the second 25 pages, we see Temur befriend some of his fellow travelers, as dark forces close in on him. Meanwhile, in a city not yet affected by the fighting, we meet a woman named Samarkar, who has willingly undergone surgery leaving her barren, so that she may train to be a sorcerer.

The Pillars of Hercules: Night Shade trade paperback, March 2012, 387 pages, cover art by Daren Bader. The Pillars of Hercules reached the second round with a first-round win over Andy Gavin's The Darkening Dream. I suggested at the time that David Constantine is a pseudonym of science fiction author David J. Williams, but so far no one has come forward to confirm or deny this.

The Pillars of Hercules is fantasy/alternate history set around 330 B.C. A huge conflict is brewing, one that never happened in our world, between Alexander the Great and a powerful Athenian empire. Both sides have access to magic and advanced technology not available in our timeline. In the first 25 pages, Alexander defeated a vast Athenian fleet to seize control of Egypt, while our mercenary heroes Matthias and Lugorix managed to escape in a turbine-powered boat with a mysterious Persian princess. In the next 25 pages, the refugees arrive in Athens, while Alexander makes a pilgrimage across the Egyptian desert to see an oracle. We do not get to see this meeting onstage, suggesting Constantine is holding back something critical that Alexander has learned.

The Battle: Posting results in the first round, the challenge was not to sound too negative about books I disliked, since after only 25 pages I hadn't really given them a fair chance. In the second round, I find the challenge is to explain dropping out a book after 50 pages even though it's really good, just because the book it's up against happens to be really, really good.

The first 50 pages of The Pillars of Hercules are really good. This alternate version of ancient Greece and Persia is most interesting, and I love the descriptions of ancient Greek cities and navies even more impressive than the ones in our history. (Although you have to be careful picking through what's historically accurate and what's augmented -- reading of Athenian merchants unloading ships with cranes I assumed this was an anachronism, but further research tells me they actually used cranes in ancient Greece.) A massive conflict is brewing, driven by Alexander's ambitions. It feels like the sort of good-versus-evil battle familiar in epic fantasy, but was Alexander really evil? Although I haven't gotten terribly attached to any of the characters so far, the banter between Matthias and Lugorix is amusing.

The first 50 pages of Range of Ghosts are amazing. I read through every passage twice, once as a reader, marveling in the story, and imagery and language; once as an aspiring writer, trying to figure out how I could write like that (short answer: ain't gonna happen).

To start with, Bear shows a marvelous flair for introducing the fantastic elements of her story. Here, for instance, is the sorcerer al-Sepehr with his book of dark spells:

A book. Or what could have been the ghost of a book, perhaps -- its covers translucent gray, marked with letters white as bone; its binding rings silver; and every transparent page within etched with the gorgeous serpentine cursive letters and diamond-shaped accents of the dialect of ancient Erem.

The glass covers chimed softly as al-Sepehr drew on a kidskin glove and opened them with infinite care. Some of the page edges were chipped, and he was too well acquainted with the illness that followed when he let this dire old thing taste his blood. One by one, he turned the crystal leaves, watching as transparent letters cut in transparent pages caught the sunlight.

Every word twisted in his head and made his eyes ache and burn. He found the page he wanted and settled down to study the spell inscribed therein.

To raise the enemy's dead and bind them to your bidding.

Temur will have to faced these raised dead, including the ghost of his own brother.

All the non-fantastic elements of Range of Ghosts are just as good. The scenery and different cultures in the story are fascinating, with a very different flavor than most epic fantasy. Samarkar is an intriguing character, a woman who does not seem power-hungry, yet she gave up a position in high society for power. Temur is an extremely likeable young man -- he gets a love scene that is very beautifully written, but also downright hot, because we are so happy to see something nice happen to him. But the scene ends on a bittersweet note, as one of the moons in the night sky flares out, indicating that another of Temur's relatives has died.

Where is all this headed? Will Temur decide to try to reclaim the throne from his uncle? Will he find an ally in Samarkar? Let me say for the record: I don't care. Wherever Elizabeth Bear decides to take this story, I want to go there with her.

THE WINNER: RANGE OF GHOSTS by Elizabeth Bear

Range of Ghosts advances to the semifinals, to face And Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Winter 2012, First Round :: Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear vs. Jack of Ravens by Mark Chadbourn

Our penultimate first round match in the Winter 2012 Battle of the Books is between Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear and Jack of Ravens by Mark Chadbourn. The book I most want to continue reading after 25 pages will advance to the second round.

Range of Ghosts: Tor hardcover, March 2012, 334 pages. Elizabeth Bear is still a fairly new author; her first novel Hammered appeared in 2005. But she is so prolific it feels like she is a veteran of the field -- she has published upwards of 20 books already. She was the Campbell Award winner for best new author in 2005, and she has twice won the Hugo Award for her short fiction. On the strength of that record, we named Range of Ghosts one of our four seeded books for the Winter 2012 Battle of the Books.

Range of Ghosts is the first in a new epic fantasy trilogy, drawing heavily on the history of the Mongol Empire. As the story begins, the Great Khagan has died, and his descendants have fought a bloody battle over succession (the kind of civil war that actually fractured the Mongol Empire). Our hero Temur, grandson of the Great Khagan and younger brother of one of the main contenders to the throne, has survived the battle only because he was so grievously wounded he was left for dead. He struggles to survive and to find his way into exile, even as his uncle seeks to hunt him down.

Jack of Ravens: Pyr trade paperback, March 2012, 414 pages, cover art by John Picacio. British fantasy author Mark Chadbourn is also prolific, having published some 15 novels since 1992, and he is a two-time winner of the British Fantasy Award. He has been successful in Britain for many years, but only recently came to the attention of American readers with Pyr Books' U.S. reprints of his backlist.

First published in England in 2006, Jack of Ravens is the first in the Kingdom of the Serpent trilogy, which is related to Chadbourn's prior trilogies, The Age of Misrule and The Dark Age. The protagonist is Jack Churchill, who on the very first page finds himself somehow transported to the remote past, and immediately doing battle with supernatural creatures.

The Battle: Sorry if I'm spoiling the suspense here, but Range of Ghosts just has a kick-ass opening. It is beautifully written, and the opening image of Temur waking up badly injured, among countless dead warriors scattered about the steppe, pulls us into the story from the outset. We sympathize with Temur as he struggles to survive the next days, then gradually begins to ponder what future he can still lead. Meanwhile, a quick glimpse of the mysterious sorcerer aiding his uncle -- he has just sacrificed two young girls for his blood magic, so we know this guy means business -- keeps the dramatic tension up.

The icing on the cake is a gorgeous piece of supernatural imagery, as Temur watches the moons rise:

He tried not to count the moons as they rose but could not help himself. No bigger than Temur's smallest fingernail, each floated up the night like a reflection on dark water. One, two. A dozen. Fifteen. Thirty. Thirty-one. A scatter of hammered sequins in the veil the Eternal Sky drew across himself to become Mother Night.

Among them, no matter how he strained his eyes, he did not find the moon he most wished to see--the Roan Moon of his elder brother Qulan, with its dappled pattern of steel and silver.
* * *
Before the death of Mongke Khagan, there had been over a hundred moons. One for Mongke Khagan himself and one for each son and each grandson of his loins, and every living son and grandson and great-grandson of the Great Khagan Temusan as well--at least those born while the Great Khagan lived and reigned.

Every night since the war began, Temur had meant to keep himself from counting. And every night since, he had failed, and there had been fewer moons than the night before.

The bar was thus set very high for Jack of Ravens, and Chadbourn didn't clear it for me. There's nothing wrong with the opening of this book, just not quite enough right to compete with Range of Ghosts. The opening scene has our hero Jack battling a giant (pun intended by Chadbourn), and it would be a pretty good fight scene, except it's happening before we know the first thing about who (or where or when) this protagonist is, so we don't much understand why we should care.

Soon after, we realize that Jack has been thrown 2,000 years into the past, but there is a maddening vagueness to the narrative. We learn he doesn't remember very much, but Chadbourn doesn't stop to tell us clearly just what he does remember. Is he even from our time? As far as I know, he could be from the year 1900 or 2100. Really all we know of him is that he (conveniently) is a scholar of British history. I have no sense so far of his personality. He wants to get back to the present(?) because he's in love with some woman he can barely remember, but so far it doesn't mean much to me whether he succeeds. Perhaps I would gradually come to care about this fellow's plight, but the Battle of the Books format is unforgiving of "gradually."

THE WINNER: RANGE OF GHOSTS by Elizabeth Bear

Range of Ghosts advances to the second round, to take on either The Darkening Dream by Andy Gavin or The Pillars of Hercules by David Constantine.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: Asimov's Science Fiction March 2008

The Magazine of the Week is the March 2008 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, containing "Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear, this year's winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novelette. For the details of this story, see my recommendation of "Shoggoths in Bloom" when I came across it last year.

This is Elizabeth Bear's second Hugo; she won Best Short Story in 2008 for "Tideline." This year she swapped places with Ted Chiang, who won Best Novelette in 2008 and Best Short Story this year. I'm not going to do a separate Book of the Week for Chiang's Hugo-winning short story "Exhalation" (believe it or not I don't have a copy of the anthology it appeared in), but for more about him see my Ted Chiang 2008 Hugo post. Next week, the winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear

My story recommendation for this week is "Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear, a novelette first published in the March 2008 issue of Asimov's, and now available on-line here.

In the past five years, Elizabeth Bear has published fourteen novels and closing on fifty short stories. That would be impressive if she were writing crap, but to be able to write her award-caliber fiction at that pace is simply absurd. I only started reading her stuff last year, and I despair of ever catching up.

As Cthulhu fans will know from the title, "Shoggoths in Bloom" is an homage to H.P. Lovecraft. An earnest professor in the late 1930's studies great, amoeba-like shoggoths found off the coast of Maine and finds more than he bargained for. I know it's sacrilegious, but to my reckoning there is far more of this sort of thing around than we really need. Yes, Lovecraft was ahead of his time, and still worth reading today despite his obvious flaws as a writer. But if you are interested in his work, you can find it pretty easily; there is little need for today's authors to continue adding to the Cthulhu Mythos.

I will forgive Elizabeth Bear in this case, however, for two reasons. First, "Shoggoths in Bloom" is such a beautifully crafted story that it would make for excellent reading even if you never heard of H.P. Lovecraft. Second, Bear tells the story convincingly through the eyes of an educated African-American in the 1930's, who must silently endure being called "boy" by the ignorant locals, even as he reads with horror of the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Germany. Bear manages to relate the Cthulhu background to this context, a most fitting reworking of the Cthulhu Mythos, since Lovecraft himself was an intolerable racist and anti-Semite. (Don't bother arguing the point -- the man had a cat named "Nigger-Man," for heaven's sake.) Bear handles her social message very adeptly without ever lecturing her reader.

I'll have another story involving race relations to recommend next week.

Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: Asimov's Science Fiction June 2007

The Magazine of the Week is the June 2007 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, with funky alien cover art by John Allemand. This is the Magazine of the Week because it contains "Tideline" by Elizabeth Bear, this year's Hugo Award winner for Best Short Story.

Elizabeth Bear has recently burst onto the science fiction and fantasy scene. Her first story was published in 2003 and her first novel in 2005, but incredibly she will have released fourteen books by the end of this year, all of which have been well received. "Tideline," her first work to be nominated for a Hugo Award but one suspects not the last, is the moving tale of a derelict but intelligent war machine seeking meaning in its final days of consciousness before its batteries die.

Having now covered all of Denvention's Hugo winners for fiction, next week's Book of the Week will be the most collectible item I acquired in the Denvention dealer room.

2008 Hugo Award Winners

BEST NOVEL
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

BEST NOVELLA
"All Seated on the Ground" by Connie Willis

BEST NOVELETTE
"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang

BEST SHORT STORY
"Tideline" by Elizabeth Bear

Here are the fiction categories Hugo winners, the top awards, not a complete list of Hugos awarded. The Hugo Awards were presented last night, August 9th, at Denvention 3 in Denver, Colorado. We were there!

Aaron's Take on the 2008 Hugo Nominees :: SHORT STORIES

As is often the case, the short story Hugo nominees are a weaker group than the novelettes, I suspect because it is difficult at such a short length to draw the reader in deeply enough to create the impact one expects of an award-caliber story. As a result, the Hugo short story ballot typically contains an unfortunately high proportion of fluff pieces.

This year, that includes Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359? by Ken MacLeod, a fun far-future romp that had entirely passed out of my mind one day after reading it, and A Small Room in Koboldtown, a silly little SF mystery that I found well short of the level of Michael Swanwick’s best work. (Apparently many others liked it rather more than I did as it just won the Locus Award, although that may just reflect the asinine decision by Locus to change how they counted the votes after the ballots were cast -- note that Koboldtown had fewer total votes and fewer first-place votes than Tideline.)

A half-notch above those two for me is Mike Resnick’s Distant Replay, the simple but charming story of an elderly gentleman who meets a young woman remarkably similar to his late wife, and Last Contact by Stephen Baxter, in which the human race learns that the end of the world is nigh, with understandably sad results.

My favorite of the short story nominees is Tideline by Elizabeth Bear, the poignant story of a derelict but intelligent war machine struggling to find meaning in its final days. Even if the short story category is not terribly strong overall, Tideline would be a worthy Hugo winner.

Aaron's Ballot:
1. Elizabeth Bear – Tideline
2. Stephen Baxter – Last Contact
3. Mike Resnick – Distant Replay
4. Ken MacLeod – Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?
5. Michael Swanwick – A Small Room in Koboldtown